Finishing stroke. The phrase is French for “blow of mercy,” a death blow administered to end a wounded person’s suffering. It probably originated in dueling or other sword fighting and had been adopted into English by about 1700 and was already being used figuratively for the finishing stroke for any kind of enterprise. For example, “He carefully placed the figures of bride and groom on top of the cake, the coup de grâce for an artistic creation.”

The very best of all. Cream is, of course, the richest part of milk and rises to the top. It was transferred to mean the best of any collective entity by the seventeenth century. John Ray, for example, included “That’s the cream of the jest” in his collection of English proverbs (1678). The exact locution involving the best of the crop was no doubt adopted for its alliterative appeal. The French version, la crème de la crème, literally “the cream of the cream,” meaning the best of the best, was well known in English by 1800 or so and also is considered a cliché. It gained new impetus in Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, first made into a play, then a motion picture (1969), in which the schoolteacher-heroine assures her students that they will, under her tutelage, become the crème de la crème.

A sense of unity, pride, or common purpose among the members of a group. The term came directly from French into English in the late eighteenth century and often was misspelled, as by Jane Austen in Mansfield Park (“I honour your esprit du [sic] corps”). It continued to be used because, as Sir Frank Adcock put it, it describes “that typically English characteristic for which there is no English name” (1930). An American equivalent from the sports world is team spirit.

The most notable or most highly prized feature of a group or series; the star attraction. Originally, from the 1790s or so, this French term always referred to a meal’s greatest delicacy (an appropriate matter of concern to French palates). By the mid-nineteenth century the term had been transferred to other outstanding items, at least in English. Thackeray, in an essay (1840) about art, stated: “To supply the picture lover with the pièces de résistance of the feast.”